Subscription to a feed? Not something new, is it?

Now you might be thinking that it’s nothing more than just another competitor for Google Reader. As a matter of fact, I think it sort of is, but it isn’t. In a Network Solutions blog post I wrote last week, I had spoken with the CEO of LazyFeed, Ethan Gahng, about the fact that his product looks and sounds similar to Google Reader and he said it wasn’t. In fact, it’s all about the “accidental discovery”. A great point he made was that with Google, you already know what feeds you want, but with LazyFeed, you’re actually searching based on tags for feeds to subscribe to. That’s your main interest and it makes absolute sense now with the popularity of social media. Everything these days is tags this, tags that and, did I forget to mention, tags?

These tags are basically search keywords. You’re going to look for these tags in LazyFeed and it’s going to pull up not the blogs that have the tags scattered around somewhere. Rather, it will give you specific blog posts, videos, photos, and other relevant content current to that time that you can either bookmark, pass over, or whatever.

So how does it all work? What’s so fascinating about it?

When you first log into the site, you’re greeted with a two column environment – almost looks like the 90s era of web development when using frames in websites was really cool. But actually they pull it off much better here in LazyFeed and use better technology than what was done back then.

The interface is split into two columns: your left-hand side is where your favorited (or “added”) tags, blog posts, etc are kept. The right-hand side is the main column. This is where most of your activity will occur. Upon first logging in, you’re greeted with a giant box area that tells you what the hot topics are online and it is all reported in real-time. There is no refresh button you need to click. Had this site been up a couple of weeks ago, you would have probably seen the rise of the “Michael Jackson”, “Farrah Fawcett”, and even “Sarah Palin” trends. Some may find this incredibly helpful because if you’re not sure what tags to look for regarding a particular subject, then this would enable you to easily click and read what people are saying in real-time (e.g. there are numerous variations and tags for the “Michael Jackson” tragedy. Tags could range from “MJ” to “Jacko” to “MichaelJackson”).

Another part of the right-hand column holds a nice cool feature where you can connect your LazyFeed account with one of your social media sites. Unfortunately it’s not like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect. Rather, it’s just pulling in the feeds from sites like Twitter, Del.icio.us, Flickr and any website with an RSS feed. Basically what it does is it pulls the tags out from your posts and scours the web and corresponds any interesting news relevant to that tag to the information pulled from the sites you’ve connected to. So take this blog post for example. If I connected this to my LazyFeed account, it will pull the tag “lazyfeed” from this post and then on my home screen on LazyFeed, I’ll receive blog posts, photos and video all tagged with “lazyfeed”.

Looking back, this is actually a quite ingenious way to find information you’re interested in. For me, I love to learn more about social media, photography, marketing, etc. and I hope this blog covers that. But I want to know what others are doing and saying at the same time, so I can connect my blog to LazyFeed and instantly I’ll be able to see other content of considerable interest to me. Success!

Once you’ve entered the tag you wish to search, the above image is representative of the result you get. As you can see, it gives you the latest content with the associated tags, but also gives you some other related topics/tags that you might be interested in – as I had entered in “advertising”, I’ve been offered “marketing”, “business”, “internet”, etc. From here, you can do one of two things, add the tag to the left-hand column by simply clicking on the green “Add” button, or scroll down and look at the entries before you. Keep in mind that they are the latest bits of content and the site is all in real-time. So as soon as something new is published on the web and becomes noticed by LazyFeed, all the existing content will immediately be pushed to the bottom of the screen – fresh and new content always at your fingertips.

If you choose to look at one of the feed results, note that you can read the synopsis on LazyFeed or view the website itself by clicking on the “external website” link offered next to the headline. Depending on the RSS settings by each website, you may only be privy to an abridged version of the content. If there are videos or photos, you’ll be able to watch them all without leaving the LazyFeed environment. From there, if you like the blog post, video or photo, you can just click on the green “add” button and it will also be added to the left-hand column.

Okay. So what’s the catch? Where’s the bad news?

There really isn’t any bad news to this. For the most part, LazyFeed seems to have all the potential to be a really big hit in the social media/real-time space. It even has a really great evangelist in Louis Gray like FriendFeed has in Robert Scoble. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a couple of things that I want to see and what may trouble some people:

• No sharing? Unfortunately there’s no sharing of content with other LazyFeed users. Right now imagine the site as purely private for you, as the individual, only. If you want to share the search results from a query or an awesome video or photo you saw on the site, go to the source of the content and email that to your friends or colleagues or perhaps just have them see it on your computer.
• No custom URL? Again a small bummer. When you log into LazyFeed, you’re noticing that it says “lazyfeed.com/discover”, not “lazyfeed.com/kenneth/discover”. It just adds a bit more to the aura of personalization and making it mine and to distinguish my account from others.
• Archiving? No way! When I spoke with their CEO, I asked about what happens if you wanted to look at a blog post that appeared on your LazyFeed account an hour ago but you didn’t bookmark it, you needed to keep scrolling and scrolling but in the end it might be futile. There’s no way to reference it. LazyFeed is all about the here and now. Anything that happens after five minutes is ancient history. I’ve been told to “look for it on Google”.
• Usability might be out to lunch. When looking at the site during the preview, I realized that the site often required at least one more than the commonly-accepted best practice of “two clicks or less”. That might turn away people from using the site who think that by clicking more than needed means not being lazy.
• Clutter, clutter, everywhere! If you do try LazyFeed, I do encourage you to add as many tags as you want to the left-hand column (almost like your “favorites” or “bookmark” section). Next, go find blog posts and other content you want to add to the column as well. After a while you’re going to realize that it might seem a bit clutter and unorganized, especially what that column also is updated in real-time. When a new post or entry is made in relation to any of those items in the column, that item highlights and then moves to the top of the column. Might be a bit confusing.
• Tweet? Tweet? Anyone? Search results do not include any tweets from Twitter?

Where’s the business applicability?

To be honest, I was wondering what the hell LazyFeed would be used for from a business perspective. It can’t be that this application was meant for only consumers, right? Well looking at the site a bit further I think there is some interesting possibilities, but nothing that is to the scale of how companies would use Facebook, Myspace or even YouTube. Rather, it’s for two reasons, and two reasons alone: buzz monitoring and internal research. Here’s what I mean…

With buzz monitoring, companies can enter in tags that they want to monitor. Of course these tags would be something like their product name, brand name, any key employees or stakeholder that has influence, etc.

For example, by now I’m sure that you may have heard of the incident surrounding United Airlines? If not, long story short, the airline broke a band member’s expensive guitar, wouldn’t pay, now band seek retribution by putting the airline’s brand further in the toilet with a hit song. So if I was an employee at United Airlines, I might enter in the tag “UnitedAirlines” and get an up-to-date report on the “sentiment” on my company.

If you’re running a conference or event and want to know what people are saying about you during or after the event, then do a search for the commonly used tag. For those of you in the technology or social media space or perhaps use Twitter a lot, you’re aware of the term hashtag. When creating content, be it blog posts, video, podcasts, photos, music, etc about an event/meeting, you’re always “supposed” to use a hashtag. Well that same hashtag can also be entered into LazyFeed to produce interesting results.

In the above image, I did a query on what people have been saying or posting about the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event hosted by TechCrunch last Friday. As you can see, there are at least one recent blog posts written about the event and several photos that are online to mark the event. Perhaps LazyFeed has become a more potent weapon for gathering research on which media is writing about your event and which ones aren’t. There’s no further need to scour the web aimlessly or using search engines to gather your data. Just plop in the tags you want and you’ll get your articles and content effortlessly.

As it relates to internal research, I often find myself wanting to know more about a particular subject but often times I don’t know where to look. Sure, I can do some research on sites like Wikipedia, CNN, Encarta, Yahoo, Bing and Google, but there are millions, if not, billions of people posting their unsolicited insights and I want to take advantage of it and learn. So what can I do? Plug in a tag into LazyFeed and see what’s going on. For companies wanting to gain an upper hand over their competitors to understand what’s happening in the industry from other “insiders”, this is probably a perfect tool at their disposal.

Having spent several years in the tourism and web industry, I’m aware of the constant changes that can happen. Luckily, with LazyFeed, I’m able to look at what others are predicting for the industry and learn to grow with it. Maybe there’s new technology that a competitor is using that made it onto a blog but not mainstream media – then through LazyFeed, I’d be the first to know, wouldn’t I?

Another way to look at it is to gauge how your product or campaign is doing BEFORE receiving the news from a journalist who got it from a blogger in the first place. I’m sure that with the release this month of the new Blackberry Tour, the blogosphere is abuzz about what’s cool about this new phone. Should the company (Research in Motion) be using LazyFeed, they might see real-time content updates surrounding what people are saying and quite possibly reply back immediately – showing incredible customer service and hedging off any issues that may arise.

So what’s the verdict?

I’d say that LazyFeed holds water. It’s definitely got some long-term potential and I’d think that when you have a chance, you should try it out. Right now they’re in the beta stage and offering invites on a periodic basis, it seems. You can add your name to the “waitlist” and when they open it up to more people, they’ll issue out “promotional codes” for you to register.

Read more reviews about LazyFeed from ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Louis Gray and from Network Solutions.

This is a cross-blog post from Network Solution’s Solutions Are Power website that I guest wrote. Originally posted on SolutionsArePower.com on June 23, 2009.

Back in August 2008, public relations professional, author of the book Putting Public Back In Public Relations and creator of the term “PR 2.0″, Brian Solis released what is called the Conversation Prism. But what exactly is this Conversation Prism? According to Solis, it’s to help “provide a visual representation of the true expansiveness of the Social Web and the conversations that define it”. There has been a lot of new tools and applications that have appeared over the past few years and this has become a pretty crucial means of keeping track of how people engage in conversations online.

So what does it all mean? It looks pretty convoluted so here’s an explanation to help make it pretty clear:

The core of the conversation is the brand. It’s the main reason why you’re going to have a conversation. From there, your goal is to become the observer, listener, internalizer and router. This is where you look to find the communities you should participate in and to gain the research on how to improve your relationships with your customers.

After listening and researching how you can enter the conversation, you need to create an environment inside your company and brand that will respond to the conversation being had. So what type of infrastructure will you have to handle crisis communication, product & sales, marketing & public relations, and even community? It’s in this phase of the conversation that you’ll need to help determine who will be managing each component. Is it a community manager? Do you have a committee who will determine the next course of action but with a single leader?

According to Brian Solis, the next cycle after establishing your brand, listening, and determining the authority on managing the conversation will complete the “image of the conversational workflow”, but not the cycle. It should be noted that this is where you begin to participate. You, as the community manager, will begin to shape the dialogue through active participation, building online relationships (which will help build brand visibility and strengthen its value), engaging in researching for ongoing feedback and insight, and finally recognizing that conversations extend beyond the online realm – it’s also about meeting people in real life.

Okay, now you know the steps to creating the conversation, where do you talk the talk?

This is the outer part of the Conversation Prism. You seek out where your customers/community are and then engage them there. One step to begin would be to create what’s called a social map. Take your customers information and research and find out where on the social networks are they having a dialogue. As Solis points out, doing so will help you identify exactly where relevant discussions are taking place, as well as their scale and frequency. The outer realms of the Conversation Prism are categories of social networks and examples of specific sites within each category. So if you’re finding that your customers are active on photo social networks, you might look into seeing what conversations are being had on Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Picasa, or others.

Solis recommends that anyone serious about conversations should conduct an audit and gauge where customers are and track the results. He also suggests measuring the rate of occurrence, whether each instance required a response, and if so, by whom, and also the potential reach of each dialog by quantifying the network of friends and friends of friends in order to establish priority, authority, response strategies, and urgency. You can read more about the idea of the Conversation Prism here.

The idea behind diagramming how conversations can take place online is a pretty great one and Brian Solis has done a great job putting something conceptually together. Combined with a great aesthetically pleasing diagram by Jesse Thomas, the Conversation Prism is a glowing representation on the ever-expanding universe of the social web. Regardless of the type of conversations being had on social networks, the point is that they should. Learn to focus on the brand, the infrastructure, its management and the effort in participation and you’ll have plenty of discussions for years to come.

Image credit: Brian Solis/Jesse Thomas (ConversationPrism.com)

This Friday, technology blog TechCrunch, brings to the San Francisco Bay Area a special event called CrunchUp - a conference mashup designed to bring brilliant minds together to explore and map out different paths that the technology stream can take. Hosted by TechCrunch’s IT editor Steve Gillmore and the creator of blog, Michael Arrington, this event has an exciting lineup of companies ready to not only demo their wares but also present their ideas to the crowd and hopefully engage in some thought-provoking, yet inspiring conversation.

From what I’ve gathered at the agenda and talking to others, CrunchUp offers two distinct areas for attendees to explore but only offers one central theme. I’m looking forward to the event because it entirely focuses on those applications and issues surrounding the concept of “real-time”. The two distinct areas that I referred to is that CrunchUp has a spot for companies to demo and present their products while also giving other established companies the opportunity to sit on panels and discuss what’s going on in the industry.

But what is this real-time phenomenon that we’re all talking about? Real time is basically discovering or unveiling new information/content to the user in a live setting – there’s no need for manual operations or refreshing of the screen. Instead the application or tool automatically publishes the new content as soon as it is received. One particular application that I find most resembles the “real-time” theme is FriendFeed. When you visit the website, you currently have a list of those you are following. But as soon as someone that you’re following publishes something new to their stream, that data will automatically be published and look like it’s an auto-update ticker. Perhaps an analogy would be like a stock ticker as you watch the business report on CNBC or Fox Business. The stock ticker keeps scrolling and always displays up-to-date information. Well that up-to-date information is essentially “real-time”.

Now that you know what it is, is there any value in attending TechCrunch’s CrunchUp event? I imagine so because you’re going to get some real insight from the experts and the creators on how to take advantage of this trend. Everyone wants the latest news and content now – almost like instant gratification…and this event will be sure to give it to you and more. Get to hear from companies like FriendFeed, Seesmic, Facebook, Google, Qik, UStream, Virgin America, Yammer, Tweetmeme and many more. Here’s just some of the things on the agenda:

• 9:00 – 9:45 am The Real Time Opportunity
• 9:45 – 10:30 am The Real Time Moment
• 10:30 – 10:55 am Real Time Communication Demos
• 11:05 – 11:30 am Real Time Application Demos
• 11:30 – 12:15 pm Real Time Search
• 12:15 – 12:30 pm Real Time Mobs
• 1:45 – 2:15 pm Real Time Media Demos
• 2:15 – 2:30 pm Business Demos
• 2:30 – 3:15 pm Real Time Business
• 3:30 – 4:45 pm Real Time Roundtable
  

The CrunchUp will take place on Friday, July 10 from 9-4:30pm in Redwood City at the Fox Theatre. Tickets are $295 and are on sale now. Admission to TechCrunch’s hottest season event, the August Capital MeetUp, is automatically included with purchase.

I will be there as part of the media and hope to capture the excitement of the event and see some demonstrations that might be interesting. If you see me there, let me know as I’d love to chat with you.

Not all networking needs to be stiff and boring. It’s a great time to go out and get to form a more common bond and relationship and who knows what will happen – a network may form, partnerships may be established, and most likely fun will be had by all. I will be going along with the cast and crew of this bus voyage to wine country and have been tasked with documenting the activity.

All of this has been arranged through the great folks of the Social Media Club. I have mentioned them throughout my blog on different occasions but haven’t really said much about this extraordinary organization that I’m proud to be loosely associated with (I say loosely because I attend the events but haven’t been a member).

Started in 2006 by Chris Heuer, Kristie Wells and several others, the Social Media Club’s established goal was to “help people find all the relevant communities of interest in which they want to participate.” In other words, they wanted to connect folks with a passion for being social, understand the web and its technology, and wanted to network in a professional setting with one another. It is truly a global organization that has spanned local chapters around the country and also the world with over 55 networks already established and growing! You can read more about the mission behind the Social Media Club here and also what you can do to help them grow.

This Saturday will be just another great event for professionals to be social and network with one another and if you’re interested and happen to be around the San Francisco Bay Area, tickets are still available for $65.00. The wineries that we will be going to include:

• First stop – Keller Estate – Known for their pinots and chardonnays.
• Second stop – Balletto and Dutton-Goldfield - Family run wineries with a passion for what they do.
• Third Stop – Owl Ridge – Won “Best New Winery” at the Wine literary awards tasting in 2006.

So stop what you’re doing and get over to buy your ticket to have some fun with industry professionals. No, we won’t be “talking shop”, but you’ll at least make better connections this way, right? Tickets are on sale through 12:00pm PST on Friday, July 10th and are $65.00 per person. This includes tastings at each vineyard, lunch, and making your own bottle of wine top bring home with you. Click here to buy your ticket(s) today!

Of course I could do the work needed for Best Buy, but before I knew it, another interesting development took place. It appears that the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) the company decided to apparently crowdsource the job description. What a surprising and excellent move! Often times I find that companies that are looking for people to fit specific jobs list a vacancy description with much more “fluff” than is actually needed or desired in the employee. At one of my previous spots, I remember being asked about what my successor would need to have in order to be the best fit in the company. I, of course, listed the duties and responsibilities that I had encountered during my time at the job & that somehow got translated into the job description.

In the case of Best Buy,  I’m fascinated that the CMO of Best Buy, Barry Judge, made this remark: “we discovered that many people had other ideas for how this job description should look.” It seems to me that he gets it and this is going to be a truly remarkable experiment. The specific role that Judge is trying to fill is Senior Manager, Emerging Media Marketing and I would assume that this role would fit in perfectly as a community manager or evangelist or something to that effect. If you’re going to have someone with a customer/audience facing role, are you sure that your internal teams know what best to look for? I would imagine that the community knows more than the company – and that’s pretty much what Judge is doing.

So how are they trying to accomplish this?

The fine folks at Best Buy have created a website called Best Buy IdeaX where you, the customer, can participate and submit your ideas through 5pm Central Time on  July 14, 2009. What is the IdeaX site? It is the company’s own social network where people can share ideas on how to make the company better – through idea posts, popular vote and discussions with the rest of the IdeaX community. It’s on the IdeaX website that you’ll fill out your comments using a stated parameter as shown below:

Unfortunately the “winning” job description doesn’t receive a prize…merely satisfaction that their name and idea was chosen to be the definition of the job.

Barry Judge’s post on this whole experiments is filled with really good ideas and rationale for how it should be. If anything, Judge recognizes the power of crowdsourcing when he says that he recognizes that a “large group of people will come up with more ideas than a small group.” Isn’t that basically the definition of crowdsourcing? Neville Hobson, part of the great podcast team that produces For Immediate Release seems to agree.

On the flip side, it’s admitted that this position is a new one – to me it makes perfect sense to seek out advice if you don’t know how to qualify a job, ask those who may know and what possible obstacles to avoid. That’s still crowdsourcing.

Now if you read Judge’s post in full, you’ll notice that he hasn’t given the entire ship away. Rather, he’s allowing the community to pitch their own ideas for a limited part of the position. By this I mean that at the very least, Best Buy has some roles and responsibilities that are non-negotiable which is very fair because after all, it is their employee and they have a mission they want the employee to complete, but you as the community can expand on the role if it’s too limited. With respect to the basic qualifications, Judge has made it clear that there are some legal items to adhere to:

Legally, a basic qualification has to be objective.  One has to be able to use the qualification and say conclusively if a person has it or doesn’t either via the resume or other visible evidence (CV, Portfolio, etc).   “Fabulous personality”, “creative communicator”, “effective leader”, “great dancer”; while great things in a candidate and person, are not verifiable via a resume, cv, or other document, thus are not technically legitimate qualifications.  Those more subjective things are important, and are discovered or identified in the interviews.

Overall, when the community is solicited for opinions, make sure that they understand what specifics you’re asking for. Judge makes it explicit that certain criteria must be objective based. Hope that the community doesn’t squander away this opportunity to provide some valuable input. I, for one, would love to know what comes out of this and to see if this can be made into an awesome case study.

Note: I checked the Best Buy link for the Sr. Manager, Emerging Media position and they indicated that the position “has been filled”. Not sure what that’s about since they’re just starting to crowdsource, but most likely it will be up after July 14 once all suggestions are in.